Should Josh Hamilton be booed by Texas Rangers fans when the new Los Angeles Angels star returns to Texas for a game?

A former Ranger doesn't think so.

“I don’t know, man,” Michael Young told Fox Sports.com's Jon Paul Morosi. “I was following what happened maybe a week ago. I wouldn’t be shocked if they booed him, but I hope they give him the positive recognition he deserves."

Young, like Hamilton, left the Rangers this off-season, though by trade and not free-agent signing.

Hamilton created a stir when he told Dallas' CBS station, "It’s one of those things where Texas, especially Dallas, has always been a football town. So the good with the bad is they’re supportive, but they also got a little spoiled (winks at the camera), at the same time, pretty quickly. You can understand like a really true, true baseball town -- and there are true baseball fans in Texas – but it’s not a true baseball town.”

Said Young: “Josh is a fantastic player. Some of the stuff that’s been written about him is really unfair. The guy played hard. He was right in the middle of our organizational resurgence. I hope they respect him for that. Going to a division rival certainly doesn’t help matters. I understand that. But that’s the way the game goes. He got a great offer from a team and jumped on it.”

When asked about the Dallas area being a baseball town, Young told Morosi: “Looking back at what we’ve done over the last few years, it’s blown up (in popularity). Hopefully it stays that way. It’s a great place to play. They love when their teams win. We were there when the Mavs won, and that place went crazy. I was there for two World Series, and that was the loudest ballpark I ever played in — hopefully until this year.

“I think, deep down, it’s always going to be viewed as a football town, first and foremost. L.A. is a basketball town. New York is a baseball town. Boston is a baseball town. Everyone’s got the way they view certain cities. I actually don’t think Josh meant that as a negative. He just said, ‘Hey, listen, it’s probably more of a football town, first and foremost.’ That doesn’t mean it’s not a baseball town, because there are great baseball fans. … We were playing in 100-degree heat, and they’re there.”

The Young quotes come in the same timeframe when another former Ranger -- Cliff Lee -- criticized Rangers management.

Young "was the heart and soul of that team and I think they borderline took him for granted there,” Lee told reporters in Clearwater, Fla on Monday.

Lee, who spent the second half of the 2010 season with the Rangers, compared Young to Phillies’ All-Star second baseman Chase Utley.

“Definitely in Texas he was the leader on the team,” Lee said. “He was the guy. To have a personality or a player like that on our team just makes us that much better. I can’t say enough about him. He was the heart and soul of the Rangers for a while. And they are a pretty good team.”

Lee said he did not understand why the Rangers traded Young for a pair of right-handed relievers: Josh Lindblom and Lisalverto Bonilla. Lee added that he has not understood several moves by the Rangers since leaving the club, but he did not specify the transactions.

“You never know what they are thinking or their motives behind some of those things,” Lee said. “You don’t really have to understand it. They’ve got their reasons and they’ve got their theories on their team and they have a right to do whatever they want, really, as an organization.

Lee said he was not trashing the Rangers and admitted the organization has been successful since he walked away.

“They went to the World Series back to back years, and it’s hard to second-guess any of those decisions when you are in the World Series,” Lee said. “They’ve still got a pretty deep pool of players over there. They’ve done a lot of things right over the past few years. I don’t know how they’ve acquired all of those players, whether it is the draft or trades or what, but whatever they have done has been pretty good.

“So they’ve got something figured out. So I have to say that at the same time that I say it’s hard to understand what they were doing with Michael Young. They’ve fielded a pretty good team over the past few years, so you don’t really have to understand or know everything that is going on behind the scenes.”

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